In the second part of our interview with Jake Richmond of Modest Medusa Banes and I discuss with him topics like the use of gradients in comic art, background details, simplifying your artwork, cell shading, and the perils of covering up art with speech bubbles! This was not originally intended as a two parter but we chatted on with Jake after the Quackcast was over and he was so interesting, insightful, and on-topic that we didn't want to waste any of the chat we had with him.
Banes returns to the Quackcast to join me on another interview with Jake Richmond of the very popular Modest Medusa! This time we get to find out more about Jake's comic making technique, his writing style, character creation, colour technique, drawing materials, programs and his whole work flow. I had wanted to get into this last time as well on Quackcast 155 but we had a great chat about the things you can do to make money from your webcomics instead. So now we get a full picture of what goes into the making of Modest Medusa! For example; did you know it's all drawn on paper and scanned? Neither did I! This is part one, part two will come out next week. Stay tuned!
Today we welcome a dastardly new bad guy alliance between three powerful super villains of Duck City: Ozone Evil, Pit Dastardly, and Abt Destruction! In their pirate lair aboard the bottomless pirate ship, the trio revel in their shared passion for bottomlessnessnessnessitude. Abt and Pit go on to chat about getting comics published in paper form, the Hero's Alliance community project, and the Mega City 2:2135 Judge Dredd fan comic project.
After a terrible bathroom flooding incident Modest Medusa was born. That's sort of the beginning of the story of Modest Medusa, but also how the comic began too! In this Quackcast I interview Jake Richmond, the creator of the very successful and popular Modest Medusa: a pretty amazing webcomic success story. Starting out at Drunk Duck with his comic in 2011 he's been able to quit his main day job and work on his comic full time! He does some freelancing and teaching as well, but his comic is his main source of income. That's awesome! And this wasn't by luck either, or “being in the right place at the right time” that many have leveraged much of their success from, Jake got there though hard work and dedication to his readers. A real webcomic inspiration! This is the goal that every webcomicer should be aiming for and his success shows that it IS acheiveable! - Only IF you can put in that work though. It's not easy, no short-cuts.
It's one of the great tragedies of webcomics the way ‘real life’ so often gets in the way of our comic work. This Quackcast was inspired by HippieVan's newspost about webcomics that disappeared into the atmosphere or deadended into nowhere… Hippie joins Ozone and Banes to discuss the topic of comics ending before their time, comics we miss, comics we need closure from! Why do they end like that? Have you got abandoned work under your belt? Will you ever come back and finish it? What are some of your forgotten faves? Bellow are a list of ours
Come on board for the luurrrvcast! It's shining and new! This is he second and final part of our lurvcast, where we asked contributors to give us their advice, wisdom and opinions on the treatment of love, romance and relationships in fiction within popular media. We had many great replies to Bane's interesting and insightful questions on the subject, which were: How do you approach love, romance and relationships in your comics? Do you find it difficult to write this stuff? Is it easy? What do you like to see, love and relationship-wise, in the comics you read? Do you like it realistic? Angsty? Or do you like it more fantasy-based? What do you NOT like to see? What are some of the fictional couples/relationships you really like? Were there any you thought didn't work at all? Why?
Romance. Love. L'amour. Ozone and I keep talking about getting the community engaged with our Quackcast topics - The ‘Casts that feature those community posts are always my favourite episodes by far! So we put these questions to our community to see how they'd respond: How do you approach love, romance and relationships in your comics? Do you find it difficult to write this stuff? Is it easy? What do you like to see, love and relationship-wise, in the comics you read? Do you like it realistic? Angsty? Or do you like it more fantasy-based? What do you NOT like to see? What are some of the fictional couples/relationships you really like? Were there any you thought didn't work at all? Why? The replies were interesting, engaging, and enlightening. So join us! All aboard for the LurrrrvCast!
Banes and Ozoneocean revisit some memorable featured comics of 2013 to see what's up with them now and also give them a second shot at the limelight! If you didn't catch these comics the first time around then now's your chance to check them out. This is a nice little eclectic mixture of webcomics, from he family friendly stylings of Chevalier and My Friend Fear, to supernatural horror in DoorMan, Ecchi comedy soap in Blitz, action budy comedy in Handsome and Ransom, and satirical puppetry weirdness in Cavecomicdd! This is an interesting bunch.
This week we have on JustNoPoint! He was one of the brave souls that helped get DrunkDuck back on its feet again after so long being down! JNP tells us about his millennia spanning comic project focussing on the Devon family, he also tells us about how it was to get DD up and running again and what he'll be doing for us all here, and lastly he tells us about the trails of doing the DD awards in the past and how he kept that going for so very long! JNP is an interesting man with a lot of talent and a great accent!
Banes sez: Bereft of our Captain, ozoneocean, I talk with Niccea about the 2013 Drunk Duck awards, which are finishing up as we speak. She reveals some spoileriffic information (which will not be nearly as spoileriffic as you read this), and we reveal the not-so-breaking news that the drunkduck.com domain is ours again! Please get involved in planning the 2014 Awards! Niccea will need help!
What I did on my holidays… Banes and Ozoneocean are back for the new year! Happy new year everybody! Banes and Ozone chat about all the non-comic stuff they did over the new years break, just a lot of general banter, jokes, and back and forth, talking about stuff we felt was cool and fun over that time. The kind of stuff you do over the holidays!
Summary: For the final Quackcast of 2013 we have an extra special treat for everyone: ALL three of the annual DD radio plays in a single quackcast! The first one produced by Ayesinback and written by Ally Haert, the second one again produced by Ayesinback but written this time by Gunwallace, and the third written again by Gunwallace and produced by Ozoneocean. Banes and I hope you enjoy the adventures of Maxwell McDuff, private eye, we'll be back in the new year for more Quackcasts. Merry Xmas!
It's that time of year again, when we do all our traditional celebration stuff and get silly about Santa, Father Christmas, Saint Nick, Papai Noel, Viejo Pascuero, Dun Che Lao Ren, Kerstman, Joulupukki, Weihnachtsmann, Mikulas, Babbo Natale, Hoteiosho, Julenissen, Swiety Mikolaj, Ded Moroz, Jultomten… Hanukkah has been, Winter Solstice is coming up, then Christmas, then Kwanzaa, then the best party of the year: New Years!!! Hooray! For this Quackcast Banes Interviews the jolly bearded man in the red suit, Christmas comics are discussed, Secret Santa comics, and finally the The 2013 DD Radio Play!
Finally! The 2013 DD Radio play is complete! It was a long time in coming but it's out now and still within 2013, despite everything that has happened. The radio plays were started by Ayesinback and have been going for 3 years now, begining with The Karaoke Caper, then last year it was The Duck Always Quacks Twice, and now this year we're proud to bring you The Third Duck! Many great people contributed towards this, our voice actors, producers, writer and musician… and let's not forget all the great comic artists who did the lovely illustrated version! So please enjoy our radio play. -The first one was written by Ally Heart*
For this Quackcast it's just Ozone aaaaaand HippieVan! We're discussing various things, the most important of which is the Top Ten rating system for the front page of DD. It has been frozen solid since the site stopped tracking stats about TWO years ago. Hopefully we'll restart hat when we figure out how to code it up, but for now HippieVan and Irreverent came up with a good idea: The Top Ten comics will be based on how many "likes" they have. This will be calculated every week by HippieVan. So now comics have the ability to get into the top ten if they can get enough "Likes", so start campaigning people and you'll have a spot on the front page! Unfortunately we're not including Adult rated comics in that list because those can't be seen by people who aren't signed into the site so would just look like blank boxes on the front page. Never fear though, Adult comics are still ranked proudly on the comic search page in their true like order.
